That a field named for a beer can be considered acceptable while a liquor named for a Mexican town is not shows there is still plenty of ambivalence about what is appropriate and what isn't when it comes time to save a few bucks of public money. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in Jefferson County R-1's attempts to raise money for its new $12.3 million athletic complex off Route 93 outside Golden.
In 1997, the school district was running short of cash and playing fields, so administrators retained Manoogian to scare up private sponsorships for a new stadium. He started off quickly, signing up two heavy hitters. US West agreed to pay $2 million over ten years in return for naming rights to the complex, and Pepsi pledged $2.1 million in exchange for exclusive rights to sell its beverages throughout the district.
Patrick Merewether
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After that, though, Manoogian's efforts began to fall flat. "The concept of corporate sponsorship in education can scare a lot of people off," he says in retrospect.
By early 1998, for instance, it appeared as though Manoogian had brokered a lucrative deal with the Denver Post. In exchange for about $95,000 a year, the paper would be exclusively distributed within the school district and get some promotional signs in the new stadium. But confusion over the proposal -- the Rocky Mountain News later submitted a better bid -- killed the agreement.
Later, "we were asked to bring a photographer to the table," Manoogian recalls. So in exchange for the exclusive contract to take class pictures of all the district's students, Lifetouch Photography agreed to pay $120,000 over five years -- a total of $600,000 -- toward the new stadium.
Yet individual schools balked at the prospect of being told who could take their students' pictures, and the deal was modified. Now, according to Mike Mitchell, the school district's director of procurement management, two companies -- Lifetouch and The Picture Lady -- compete for business at individual schools and then give a percentage of their profits to the athletic complex. The result: This year, instead of the original $120,000 arranged by Manoogian, the district took in only $31,000.
Other deals were either killed early on or ignored to death. Lakewood Fordland promised to contribute $95,000 a year for five years toward the athletic field in exchange for the right to supply homecoming vehicles, holding a student/parent discount night at the dealership and being named official dealership of the district. But, concedes Mitchell, "we didn't act in a timely fashion, and it went by the wayside." Another Manoogian-arranged association, with an athletic apparel company and worth an estimated $85,000 a year, fell apart when the district calculated the company was too small to pull it off.
When the dust settled, the only two deals the district actually finalized were the original ones with Pepsi and US West. (Recently, Mitchell says another sponsor signed on: Evergreen Disposal, a local garbage company, agreed to give about $1,000 a year in exchange for a sign at the new complex.) As a result, despite all the talk of big-money sponsorships, Jefferson County taxpayers will be picking up more than two-thirds of the cost of the new stadium.
So what is the lesson to be found in Jefferson County's stadium and its HOPE/Columbine library? To a degree, this is a hypothetical question. The library fund must take what it is offered or fail. By comparison, when the Jefferson County school district blew its sponsorship deals, it had the luxury of falling back into a taxpayer-supported net. Administrators simply decided to delay a few other projects and build the stadium now instead.
Still, the public money being spent on the complex could have been put to other uses. For instance, the district could have lowered the fees it charges students to participate in sports -- $100 per child per sport (Denver schools charge no fee). Or it could have shifted the money to the classroom. In my tiny Jeffco mountain elementary school, parents are considering pooling their own money to hire another teacher because the district says it can't afford to.
The trick to accepting lucre, of course, is to keep the ultimate goal in mind and ask: Does the benefit of the sponsorship money outweigh the moral price tag of receiving it? Are the students at Skinner -- many of them poor and minorities -- better off having a ball field named after a domestic abuser than having a crummy ball field or no ball field at all? Would Columbine students be more harmed by living with a place tainted by murder or by studying in a new library funded in part by a strip-club owner?
Put that way, the answers are obvious. What the Jeffco stadium and HOPE/Columbine deals show more than anything is that there are few perfect deals. So Columbine's new library may be built using money raised by naked dancers. Meanwhile, after much soul-searching and hand-wringing, Jeffco's new athletic field -- scheduled to open at 7 p.m., September 28, for the football game between Columbine and Pomona -- will be named for US West, a company that three months ago was ordered by the Public Utility Commission to pay a $12.8 million penalty for inflicting lousy phone service on Colorado residents. When the doors of each facility swing open, who can say which organization has staked out the higher ground?
